We discuss the emergence of the theory of the firm (in the Coasian sense); survey and discuss the main currents of the theo~y of the firm, and discuss what has determined the emergence of the theory of the firm. We argue that advances in the theory of the firm have been strongly influenced by conceptual innovations in (mainstream) economics in general and by the ongoing division of labour in economics in tandem with a recognition of the importance of a number of empirical anomalies The substantive borrowing from neighbouring disciplines, such as business history, law, psychology, organizational sociology and business administration has been relatively limited and ad hoc (although some scholars, notably Williamson, have made more substantive use of these disciplines than othe~s) The fact that the theory of the firm has stayed relatively close in to the (changing) economic mainstream and that its substantive borrowing from neighbouring disciplines has been relatively limited unde~lie and explain much of the "external" critique of the theory (i.e., the critiques of sociologists, heterodox economists and management scholars).

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An Ethnographic Study of Quality Coordinator Work in two Danish Hospital Departments

Madsen, Marie Henriette(Frederiksberg, 2015)

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The issue of quality and how to provide the best possible care for patients
has always been a central concern in the health care sector. For the last
decades, this concern has resulted in formulations of quality standards and
clinical guidelines that define best practices for clinical work, as well as an
increased use of methods and procedures to measure, assess and control
quality. In this way, quality development includes certain expectations and
requirements, not only to the practices of patient care but also to the
practices of quality development. Accordingly, the organisation of quality
development in health care has become a matter of concern in its own
terms.

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The “knowledge governance approach” is characterized as a distinctive, emerging approach that cuts across the fields of knowledge management, organisation studies, strategy, and human resource management. Knowledge governance is taken up with how the deployment of governance mechanisms influences knowledge processes, such as sharing, retaining and creating knowledge. It insists on clear micro (behavioural) foundations, adopts an economizing perspective, and examines the links between knowledge-based units of analysis with diverse characteristics and governance mechanisms with diverse capabilities of handling these transactions. Research issues that the knowledge governance approach illuminates are sketched.

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South Korean and Taiwanese brands have long been household names. Today, however, the names of transnational companies (TNCs) from an increasingly diverse set of emerging and developing economies are regularly making if not the dinner table conversation then at least the headlines of the international business press. This reflects that companies such as Mittal and Tata (India), China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), Haier and Lenovo (PRC), Embraer (Brazil), SAPMiller (South Africa), and Cemex (Mexico) are foraying ever deeper into the international economy and increasingly investing abroad.
Even though FDI usually constitutes only a minor part of countries’ total capital formation, the relationships between FDI and economic growth, welfare, and industrial upgrading in developing countries have been the object of long and extensive treatment in the literature. However, the literature has overwhelmingly focused on the impact of outward FDI from developed countries into recipient developing countries. Much less analyzed has been the increasingly important phenomenon of outward FDI (OFDI) from the developing countries themselves, be it into developed or into other developing countries. Apart from a few early pioneering studies (Lecraw 1977; Lall 1983; Wells 1983; Agarwal 1985) only few studies have been made so far of outward investment from emerging and developing economies. This is in spite of the fact that the value of outward FDI stock from developing countries reached USD859 billion in 2003, up from USD129 billion in 1990, and has increased 11 times since 1985.
A limited number of recent studies do exist, though (e.g. Cai 1999; Lecraw 1993; van Hoesel 1999; Tolentino 1993; Andreff 2003; Chudnovsky and López 2000; Bulatov 1998, Yeung 2000). Furthermore, academic interest in the subject picked up considerably with the publication of UNCTAD’s 2006 World Investment Report, which was dedicated to the subject of FDI from developing and transition economies. The report was succeeded by a number of journal special issues (e.g. JIBS 2007, JIM forthcoming, TC forthcoming) and books (e.g. Goldstein 2007; Benito and Narula 2007).
This paper takes stock of the mounting trend of outward FDI from emerging economies, with special focus on a group of five countries, which are becoming increasingly economically and politically influential, viz. the ‘BRICS’ countries. An ‘S’ is appended here to the conventional acronym of ‘BRIC’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China) to include the largest economy on the African continent, South Africa. The five BRICS countries produced some USD25 billion of outward FDI flows in 2004, corresponding to some 3 percent of world FDI flows and well over half (61 percent) of total developing country outflows. OFDI from the BRICS countries has grown rapidly over the last few years, while still remaining modest compared to many developed countries.
Following a brief discussion of FDI and emerging economies in general the article proceeds to hypothesise that the increase we currently observe in outward investment from emerging and developing economies may constitute a third ‘wave’ of OFDI, distinct from the two previous waves depicted in the literature, and outlines the contours of such a wave. An empirical analysis OFDI from the BRICS countries follows, conducted at three levels: global (what is the extent, directions, etc. of outward FDI); sectoral (in which sectors is outward FDI significant); and firm level, identifying a small number of particularly interesting TNCs from emerging and developing economies

In this dissertation I focus on a national reform of the Danish public sector,
which in January 2007 facilitated the development of new municipal health care
centers in order to meet specific local demands and to improve primary health care.
However, this new organizational concept was not presented as a mandatory and
detailed legislative reform. The municipalities therefore developed centers focusing
in different ways on health promotion and rehabilitation and with great variation
in their structure. Specifically, I find it intriguing how specific actors at the
local level, such as politicians, medical professions, and social welfare professionals,
were able to participate in local developments, and how they constructed specific
organizational forms as local manifestations of the new national policy. Particularly,
I am interested in exploring how the heterogeneous institutional context
influences local actors’ translation of an abstract organizational concept into specific
organizational forms....

Tourism offers an arena through which a place identity is imagined, negotiated and contained.
This paper compares the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and show how these countries
construct and assert their identities through tourism. They both share a common history as
Czechoslovakia, however, they are perceived differently by the outside world. These former
Eastern Bloc countries are promoting themselves in several ways and they are also
marginalising their socialist past and invoking their Central European identity. The Czech and
Slovak search for destination identity takes into account tourists’ demands and perceptions.
This paper introduces the concept of the orientalist tourist gaze, and demonstrates how
orientalism may manifest in tourism. Data on how these two countries are imagined were
collected in Denmark.
Keywords: destination identity, host society-guest interaction, impact of tourism, orientalism

The field of strategic entrepreneurship is a fairly recent one. Its central idea is that
opportunity-seeking and advantage-seeking—the former the central subject of the
entrepreneurship field, the latter the central subject of the strategic management field—
are processes that need to be considered jointly. The purpose of this brief chapter is to
explain the emergence of SE theory field in terms of a response to research gaps in the
neighboring fields of entrepreneurship and strategic management; describe the main
tenets of SE theory; discuss its relations to neighboring fields; and finally describe some
research gaps in extant theory, mainly focusing on the need to provide clear microfoundations
for SE theory and link it to organizational design theory.

Agile methods have co-evolved with the onset of rapid change and turbidity in software and systems development and the methodologies and process models designed to guide them. Conceived from the lessons of practice, Agile methods brought a balanced perspective between the intensions of the stakeholder, the management function, and developers. As an evolutionary progression, trends towards rapid continuous delivery have witnessed the advent of DevOps where advances in tooling, technologies, and the environment of both development and consumption exert a new dynamic into the Agile oeuvre. We investigate the progression from Agile to DevOps from a Critical Social Theoretic perspective to examine a paradox in agility – what does an always-on conceptualization of production forestall and impinge upon the processes of reflection and renewal that are also endemic to Agile methods? This paper is offered as a catalyst for critical examination and as an overt call to action to engage in emancipatory scholarship in advocacy for the Agile development team. Under threat of disenfranchisement and relegation to automation, we question how a tilt towards DevOps will preserve key elements in the tenets and principles of the Agile methods phenomenon.

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A Semiotic Approach to the Sentence Forms Chosen by British, Danish and Russian Speakers in Native and ELF Contexts

Ibsen, Olga Rykov(Frederiksberg, 2016)

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According to Durst-Andersen’s theory of communicative supertypes all languages can roughly be
described as belonging to one of the following supertypes: (1) reality-oriented languages such as Russian
and Hindi that speak of reality through the situation being common to the speaker and the hearer;
(2) speaker-oriented languages such as Spanish and Japanese that speak of reality through the speaker’s
experience of the situation; and finally (3) hearer-oriented languages such as Danish and English that
speak of reality through the hearer’s experience of it.
Using the above-mentioned approach, this dissertation investigates the following hypotheses: (I)
native speakers of British English prefer indirect requesting strategies; (II) Danes and Russians favour
direct requesting strategies in their mother tongue; (III) Danes and Russians transfer direct requesting
strategies from their mother tongue to English; (IV) British, Danish, and Russian speakers prefer interrogative
sentence structures with the situations where the speaker and hearer do not ‘share the same
world’.
Cross-cultural data consisting of the Trolley (Permission), the Window (Prohibition), and the
Library (Impossibility) situations has been collected through role play from Danish, Russian, and
English speakers (control group) at Carlsberg, and consists of both English Lingua Franca Data and
Mother Tongue Data.
The analysis of these three situations partially provided support for hypothesis I with the native
speakers of English and II with the Russians though not with the Danes. By construing requests in
terms of a ‘problem-solving’ activity, I found that almost half of the British English speakers ‘solved the
problem’ straightaway by using the imperative sentence structure in the Trolley situation, e.g. Put your
luggage on the trolley! Yet, among the three groups, the British English speakers were the only group
who employed interrogatives most often. Both the Russian and Danish speakers preferred to solve the
problem by offering their ‘best bid for a solution of a problem’ in the form of the declarative sentence
structure in English, like.g. You can put your luggage on the trolley, whereas they preferred other ways
of solving the problem in their native languages: the Russian mother tongue speakers overwhelmingly
solved the problem on the spot with the help of the imperative form as in Stav’te svoi vešči na moju
teležku! for ‘Put (IPFV) your belongings on my trolley!’, and the Danish mother tongue speakers mostly
chose to solve the problem by ‘stating’ it, which is done with the hlp of the interrogative sentence
structure, like Skal jeg ikke lige smide den med på min vogn ? for ‘Don’t you want me to throw it on my
trolley?’. Hypothesis III was also partially confirmed with the Russians, who appeared to transfer the imperative
sentence structure from Russian to Russian English in the Trolley and the Library situations.
In addition, due to the original view on directives as trichotomous entities, it was possible to discover
covert influence of Russian aspect and transfer of the imperative mood in Russian to Russian English.
The analysis did not reveal any direct transfers of syntactic structures from Danish to Danish English.
Finally, hypothesis IV was completely confirmed since the British, Danish, and Russian respondents
largely preferred the interrogative sentence form with the Library situation.
Even though the present study has analysed only a small sample, the findings for direct and subtle
transfers from a mother tongue to English as a Lingua Franca can prove instrumental in improving
global communication, say, in the form of developing teaching material for cross-cultural business
organisations that use English as medium of communication.

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This thesis focuses on individuals’ educational achievements and labor market outcomes in a Danish
context. Particularly, the thesis aims at determining the returns to specific tertiary educational
decisions and understanding the mechanisms underlying such decisions. These related objectives are
addressed using econometric methods applied on Danish micro data. All four chapters are empirical
studies and combine data from different sources. The main source of data is an administrative data
set obtained from Copenhagen Business School (CBS) that contains detailed educational information
on students enrolled at CBS. I combine this data with register data obtained from Statistics Denmark.
The educational data is the core of Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and Chapter 4 and defines the sample in
these chapters. Chapter 1 relies exclusively on data from Statistics Denmark.
Chapter 1 (a joint work with Anders Sørensen from Copenhagen Business School) estimates the
wage premium of those with a master’s degree in business economics and management when compared
to the wages of those with master’s degrees in other fields in the social sciences. By means of an
Instrumental Variable (IV) approach, we identify the returns to a business education by addressing
the endogenous selection of master’s programs. Using season of birth as an exogenous determinant of
master’s degree choice, we find that a master’s degree in business economics and management results
in a wage premium of around 12% compared to other master’s degrees in the social sciences. Moreover,
we find that the probability of private sector employment is significantly larger for individuals with a
master’s degree in business economics and management. Finally, in contrast to the literature that finds
significant reductions in the gender wage gap when controlling for educational fields, controlling for a
master’s degree in business economics and management does not affect the large and robust gender
wage gap prevalent in our sample.

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The thesis consists of an introduction followed by three numbered chapters (independent
papers). It covers topics in international trade, and in di¤erent ways the thesis investigates
aspects of heterogeneity. The rst chapter is coauthored with Pascalis Raimondos-Møller. The
version of this chapter is published in the CESifo Working Paper Series and serves as the
nal background paper for the compressed journal article published in Review of Development
Economics, May 2012. The second chapter is coauthored with Madhura Maitra, senior PhD
student at Columbia University at the time. The third chapter is a solo paper.
In the rst chapter we introduce a traditional macro model of trade and change the com-
petitive environment by introducing state-owned enterprises. We also include heterogenous
households to analyze e¤ects on the income distribution. The chapter focuses on Vietnam s
accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2007. Upon entry, Vietnam was granted
an accession period lasting till 2014. During this period tari¤s would have to fall according
to the accession agreement. This rst chapter evaluates this 2007-2014 trade liberalization by
building an applied general equilibrium model and calibrating it to the Vietnamese data. The
model pays careful attention to the fact that Vietnam has many state-owned enterprises that
do not behave in a pro t maximizing way. The model simulations show that the WTO imposed
tari¤ reforms will reduce the overall welfare level of the Vietnamese households. Moreover, the
biggest loss of income will take place among the poor rural households in Vietnam. We propose
other tari¤ reforms that both raise overall welfare and reduce income inequality.

Research on companies’ internationalization has mainly focused on firm-level and country-level factors in order to explain firms’ cross-border activities. With the exception of a limited number of studies emphasizing rivalistic behavior in oligopolistic industries, industry factors have been neglected as potential determinants of companies’ internationalization. We argue that differences across industries with regard to competition level, research intensity, tangibility of the products, and the existence of clusters should influence the impetus and opportunities to internationalize. This study examines the role of such factors using data covering the internationalization patterns of the 100 largest non-financial Norwegian companies over the period 1990 to 2000. We find that industry factors contribute significantly to explaining the internationalization of these companies, and that the effects of industry factors remain strong when firm-level characteristics are taken into account.
Key words: Internationalization, multinational companies, industry factors, Norway
JEL classification: F21, F23, L10

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In this paper the empirical performance of ve di erent models for barrier op-
tion valuation is investigated: the Black-Scholes model, the constant elasticity of
variance model, the Heston stochastic volatility model, the Merton jump-di usion
model, and the in nite activity Variance Gamma model. We use time-series data
from the USD/EUR exchange rate market: standard put and call (plain vanilla)
option prices and a unique set of observed market values of barrier options. The
models are calibrated to plain vanilla option prices, and prediction errors at dif-
ferent horizons for plain vanilla and barrier option values are investigated. For
plain vanilla options, the Heston and Merton models have similar and superior
performance for prediction horizons up to one week. For barrier options, the
continuous-path models (Black-Scholes, constant elasticity of variance, and Hes-
ton) do almost equally well, while both models with jumps (Merton and Variance
Gamma) perform markedly worse.

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Rational expectations models make stringent assumptions on the agent's
knowledge about the true model. This paper introduces a model in which the
rational agent realizes that using a given model involves approximation errors,
and adjusts behavior accordingly. If the researcher accounts for this empirical
rationality on part of the agent, the resulting empirical model assigns
likelihood to the data actually observed, unlike in the unmodified rational expectations
case. A Lucas (1978)-type asset pricing model which incorporates
empirical rationality is constructed and estimated using U.S. stock data. The
equilibrium asset pricing function is seriously affected by the existence of approximation
errors and the descriptive properties and normative implications
of the model are significantly improved. This suggests that investors do not
| and should not | ignore approximation errors.
Keywords: Approximation errors, model uncertainty, estimation of structural
models, rational expectations, asset pricing.